Editorial Stress

What is Going on With Medium?

Facing trouble in our publications

Yesterday morning I opened my eyes from my sleep, and I went out of bed. I had breakfast and helped my kids to prepare for school while facing personal issues.

When I was finished with my personal issue, I saw a message popping up on my screen from the Slack group — a problem needed to be solved right now.

We couldn’t add any new writers to the publication. So, the owner (Dr Mehmet Yildiz) asked for help. Two editors assisted me. However, we both couldn’t add any writers. Dr Yildiz spent 2 hours to add over 100 new writers. But when he attempted to save, the system produced an error “Please add a title, tagline, or logo to your homepage.” He lost his 2 hours of effort.

Dr Yildiz pinged me requesting my help on the Slack channel. I am an editor for ILLUMINATION, ILLUMINATION-Curated, and several other publications.

What was going on here? We didn’t know. Ten million question marks ran through my mind.

Luckily, we saved the writers’ names in a file. Therefore, we could find back who we have to add as a writer at a later moment.

I helped out where I could, believing I can not let someone do this alone. That is why we are editors. We are not only here to suggest to a writer to use a grammar tool or split paragraphs into two for better reading; we are here to solve technical problems too. That is what we do-help each other out as editors.

Initially, nothing worked to solve the problem.

The only option was to write to the help desk of Medium.

“Dear Sir, Madam,

I write on behalf of ILLUMINATION. We issue a problem with adding any new writers to our publication. All writers are waiting to be added. We can not let them wait any longer.

We also don’t see the banner on articles. We tried to upload everything again, but we can not save anything. Several editors have tried to solve the problem. None of them had any result.

Thank you very much for cooperating to solve this problem.

If you have any questions, let me know.

Best wishes, Agnes Laurens Editor ILLUMINATION”

I didn’t get any response back from Medium. They were very quick before, why not now?

Later two editors popped and reviewed the same story only to find the same issue. Nothing worked. We had to wait.

I tried one more time to add writers. No writer could be added. I received the same message as before. How? Why?

I can’t let all these writers wait. They need to be added. My frustration increased. There are so many other tasks to do. And this mishap caused significant delays in our own schedule.

“Damn. This is not funny and makes me furious.”, I told the other editors.

Dr Yildiz troubled-shooted and solved the technical problem. For some reasons, the tagline was disappeared.

Then another issue popped up.

Not showing the banner?!

We couldn’t see the banner on our stories.

How does that happen? I don’t know.

No banner appeared when a story opened. Why?

“I saw you could opt-in for the beta version. Has something to do with the problem? I am trying this with my own publication, waiting to see the results.” I replied to the other editors.

So, now what is the problem? We have not finished the banner problem. I didn’t see any banners on stories of my publications. But why?

Could it be that we must upload the logos again? Nope. Nothing worked. The same problem was still there. No banner showing.

I considered if my account had a malfunction. Opting in and opting out of the beta version for publications failed to improve the banner problem.

Signing in and out from the account didn’t solve the problem as well. What is going on? Did I do interfere in a way that my account will be temporarily deactivated?

“Perhaps a reboot of the computer would clear it. Or deactivate the wifi signal and then re-activate it,” an editor suggested.

“All my publications lost the banners in stories, but they are still on the first page of the publications. It doesn’t make sense,” I explained to another editor.

The owner got this response from: “We are unable to reproduce what you are seeing. What browser and operating system versions are you using? Additionally, do you have any extensions or ad-blockers that could be interfering with Medium? To test this, you can turn all your extensions off in your browser settings, or open an incognito window to see if the problem persists.”

Dr Mehmet Yildiz documented the issue in this story.

Look and feel

“Yes, my feed looks different now. Medium is updating their look,” I surmised.

To solve the problem, I chose to use other browsers such as Safari and Chrome. Once again, no results, no resolution.

To be sure if it was not only the editors, I asked my daughter for help. I sent her the link to open the story to find out if she also got the problem.

On her phone, she got the same as we all got: no banner or any categories uploaded.

But the thing is, this is what my laptop shows:

They all have similar problems. It just happened yesterday. We haven’t had this issue before and it is not because of our browsers.

Several people experienced this issue. We all use Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox or other similar browsers. Our fellow editors Geetika Sethi, CR Mandler MAT, Tony Young, Jr. brain stormed and provided great support during this stressful time.

So, we identified that browsers were not the issue.

What is the issue then?

“No idea. It is definitely related to their version. I also see the Medium interface different today”, the owner said.

“And I lost the banner in four of my publications. Can it be a coincidence?”, I replied.

And another day passes while the issue of the banner remains unresolved. Medium is making changes a lot in the next weeks, is it that?

And that was my stressful day as an editor.